When you’re just getting a website off the ground, it can be tough to build up traffic. People who love your brand will naturally find your products, but how will you reach people who might be interested in your stuff but don’t yet have awareness of your brand? Here’s how to draw in more traffic to your website from search and referrals.
Optimize Your Site’s Performance
One of the most important factors search engines like Google now use to rank pages is site performance. Your site needs to be mobile-responsive, so that the 85 percent of American adults who use smartphones can find and navigate your site easily. Content on your web page should load within 2.5 seconds. Users should be able to interact easily with the page, so it should respond quickly. Layout should make sense and appear visually stable.
Optimize for SEO
Quite a lot of a website’s traffic can come from search engine returns, especially if the site is properly optimized for SEO. While you might want to find a Phoenix SEO company to help you with the more technical aspects of optimizing a website for search, you can implement some basic techniques yourself.
Focus on writing longer, better content. Content should always be of the highest quality and create some value for users. Make sure all of your links work and that your URLs are optimized to contain your SEO keywords. Optimize your meta data and even your passwords, if you’re comfortable enough with HTML.
Diversify Your Strategies
You need to reach out to and connect with your audience wherever they’re seeking content, not just on your blog or social media profile. Use a variety of different marketing strategies to build awareness of your brand and get more traffic to your website. Send out email newsletters, link to customer reviews or include them on your website, and consider using SMS marketing.
Build a Following on Social Media
Sixteen percent of referral traffic still comes from social media, so it’s important to be active on popular social media platforms and to engage with your audience there. Getting active on social media is a great way to get your brand message out to a much wider audience and drive some valuable traffic to your website. Post frequently to increase visibility for your content and brand.
Develop Backlinks
Backlinks from the right sites are a great way to show Google that your site has authority in your industry. This can boost your SEO rankings and bring in more traffic from search. There are several ways to generate backlinks, including writing guest posts or testimonials for other sites, participating in forum discussions, and simply creating content that people will want to link to.
Publish Great Content
You can’t draw in search traffic without great content. Great content is content that creates something valuable for the user – whether it informs or entertains, persuades or empowers, it’s giving the user something they want and need. This will be reflected in the amount of time they spend on your site, the comments they leave behind, and the shares on social media. Great content that is optimized for SEO will draw in search traffic and push up the site up search rankings.
Improve Your Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is the rate at which viewers navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. The faster and more often they do this, the higher your bounce rate. A high bounce rate shows search engines that your site doesn’t offer anything of value to most visitors, and this can harm its search ranking. Work on improving your bounce rate to improve your overall rankings and get more search traffic.
Keep Content Fresh and Relevant
From the beginning, you should focus on filling your website with evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that never gets old. It isn’t topical or timely; it can remain on your website for years without feeling dated, with only minimal or no touching up.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t post timely and topical content. Sometimes things like product reviews or company event write-ups are relevant. But, as time goes by and your website accumulates more content, make sure to refresh it every six months or so. Remove duplicate content and update content that is out of date. Remove typos, and ensure that content is always meaningful and substantive.
It’s easy to get frustrated when you’re struggling to attract the kind of traffic you want to your website. With the right strategies, though, you can start seeing more traffic from referrals and organic search – and that can raise awareness of your brand and expand your customer base.
